


Something to do with Karma

by Brinny



Series: Pink Tutus and Hellhounds [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-17
Updated: 2016-04-17
Packaged: 2018-06-02 17:09:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6574750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brinny/pseuds/Brinny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Takes place sometime after <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/6574564"><strong>Pink Tutus and Hellhounds</strong>.</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	Something to do with Karma

Dean can see her waiting for him as he pulls up to the Roadhouse and he has to bite back a low groan. She’s leaning beside the front door with a scowl on her lips and carelessly flipping a knife back and forth between her fingers. With each twist and turn of the knife in her hand, the blade catches the dim light hanging over the porch and casts sharp shadows over her face. There’s an unmistakable pout on her mouth and he guesses that she’s just as bratty as ever. 

“Shit.”

He throws the old Chevy in park and winces when the gears lightly grind together. The old girl just ain’t what she used to be. 

And again: “Shit.”

She doesn’t look up as he steps out of the car. 

Dean’s fairly certain that this none of this is going to well. 

He makes his way over to her, the former cockiness of his swagger now replaced with firm strides. It’s more of a John Winchester walk than anything and he isn’t sure if he’s permanently adopted it as he’s grown older or if he just does it around her. Man some psychologist would have a fucking field-day with him, he’s sure. 

“Hey,” he says. 

The girl lifts her eyes up to his and then gives an annoyed grunt and pitches the knife to the ground. It’s a poor throw and the hilt limply sticks up through the dirt at a skewed angle. Dean gives her a disapproving look and she purses her lips back at him. 

“She called you, didn’t she?”

Dean nods. “Yep.” 

“Figures,” she mumbles. 

“Tone,” he warns.

She rolls her eyes (oh, yeah totally still a brat) and he moves to stand beside her. She decides to heavily concentrate on scuffing the toe of her sneaker in the dirt so she doesn’t have to look at him. Dean really hopes that Jo has a beer ready for him. 

“She says you want to hunt.” 

“Yeah, so?” 

“So? So, you’re fifteen Robin, it ain’t gonna happen.”

Robin heaves a sigh and pushes away from the wall. Shoving her hands into her pockets, she turns her back to him and tucks her chin down to her chest. 

“Did you hear me?” he asks. “You’re way too young for this life Robin.”

“You were, like, a year older or something when you started.”

“Yeah, who told you that?”

She curls her shoulders forward and tries to push her hands even deeper into her pockets, fists pressed tight against the fabric and her thumbs catching around the belt loops. Sam used to do the same thing; he’d get into a big fight with Dean and he’d hunch down and make himself smaller. 

“Rob?” he prompts. “Who told you that?”

She finally settles on a shrug. “Sam.” 

Dean kind of sighs and wipes a hand down his face. Of course it was Sam. Sam’s kid can’t even walk yet. Sam still has years before he has to worry about any of this shit. Sam gets to have the fun. Sam gets to spoil her and teach her how to shoot beer cans off of fences. Sam gets to show her the proper way to kick a field goal and he gets to influence her with horrible posture. Sam gets to tell her untrue things about her dad. 

“Well,” Dean begins. “That was different, okay?”

“Whatever.”

She rolls her eyes again and blows a quick, frustrated puff of air through her lips. Her hair fans out over her forehead and then flops back into place. 

“Look, you’re just not hunting. Not now,” he says. “End of story.”

Robin looks over at the front door of the roadhouse pleadingly, like it could be an escape from the rest of the conversation. But her mom and Ellen are through there and even Robin knows that Dean is preferable to them with a matter like this. She blows out another breath through the side of her mouth and then perches on an old, empty keg that’s been sitting underneath the windowsill for as long as either of them can remember. Crossing her arms over her chest, she shifts uncomfortably, the metal digging into the backs of her thighs. 

“Why do you get to tell me what I do?” 

“Because I’m your father.”

“Why? Because one day you and Mom sat me down when I was seven and told me that you’d had some one night stand? That doesn’t make you my father.” 

“Hey,” Dean says sharply. “Watch your mouth.” 

Robin pulls her legs in closer and the soles of her sneakers hit the bottom of the keg with a soft thud. 

Sometime over the summer she’d grown an inch or four and cut off most of her hair, so now she’s all lanky limbs and boyish dimples. And with her forehead creased in anger and lips pressed tightly together tightly in a thin line, Dean could swear that she looks more like Sammy’s kid than his own. 

“You can’t stop me,” she mutters. 

“You don’t think so?” he asks. “’Cause I’m betting I can.”

“This is so unfair.”

“Nothing’s ever fair.” He shrugs and doesn’t try to stop the smirk that pulls up on the corners of his mouth. “Deal with it, kid.”

She huffs and kicks the base of the keg. The heels of her sneakers sound out slow and repetitive thumps. He wants to tell her that she’s acting childish and to knock it off, but then he remembers that she still is a child and that means that his argument holds a little less water than he’d like. 

Instead, Dean bends down and picks up the knife stuck in the ground. He turns it over a couple of times and then offers it back to her, but she just shakes her head in refusal. 

“She just wants to keep me here, her and Gran.” Robin sniffs and rubs at her nose with her knuckles, leaving behind a small smudge of dirt across her upper lip. “They don’t get it. It’s total bullshit.” 

Dean gives a low chuckle, doesn’t even bother to make a comment about the kid cussing, because the irony of the situation must really be eating Jo alive. No wonder she pleaded with him to drag his ass down here and deal with Robin. He almost wishes he was there to see Jo’s face when their kid said she was going to start hunting. He would’ve taken a picture. 

“That what you think?” he asks. 

Robin moves her shoulders up and down, biting at her lips and looking down at the ground. Dean leans against the keg, tucks the knife into his boot, and pushes at her to make room. She slides over half an inch and narrows her eyes in his direction, like she’s doing him some big service.

“Let me tell you a little story about your mom,” he says. “When she was a couple of years older than you, I don’t know, eighteen, or whatever—”

Robin interrupts with a snort, “You didn’t even know Mom when she was that young. Didn’t you, like, break into the bar and Gran almost shot you?” 

“Almost shot Sam, not me. Your mom punched me in the face. Hell of a right hook.” Dean laughs and can’t help but trace his forefinger down the bridge of his nose, remembering the hard crack of Jo’s knuckles. He clears his throat and presses a fist to his lips, continuing, “But anyway, your mom and me, we talked actually about stuff after we met. Strange, I know, but sometimes adults like to have long conversations about their lives and shit. It’s called bonding.”

“Yeah right.” Robin’s arms are still folded over her chest and she gives another thump of her feet like she’s punctuating her sentence with the sound. “You guys barely get along.”

“Didn’t then either. Yelling is still talking, though.” He points a finger and nudges her with his elbow, but doesn’t get a response. “So, your mom, when she was eighteen, your grandma wanted her to go to school and she wanted to hunt.”

“Mom isn’t a hunter.”

“No, she’s not. She went to school. Just like you should. ‘Cause you get into this stuff now, kid, and it’s hard as hell to get out. And me and your mom, we don’t want that for you. You’ve got choices.”

“Well, then I choose to hunt.”

He laughs again. “Lemme rephrase that, Rob. You’ve got choices that we make for you.”

“So unfair.”

Dean nods and knots his fingers together. “Your gran didn’t want your mom to hunt either. But she did for awhile, by herself. And it almost destroyed them, your mom and your gran. They didn’t talk for about a year. C’mon don’t do that to your mother, kid.”

“I’m not doing anything to her.”

“Robin,” he says, another sigh on the tip of his tongue. “You wanna work with me on this one?”

She slowly slides off of the keg, but keeps her hands curled around the metal top and drags the tip of her shoe in the dust. She looks up at Dean and pulls her bottom lip between her teeth, a gesture that’s insanely like Jo. He can tell by the way her eyes have softened that she’s planning something; another thing that’s insanely like her mother. Fifteen years and sometimes it still catches him off-guard. 

“So, Gran let Mom hunt after she was eighteen?” she asks. 

“Oh, no.” He laughs. “No, I see where this is going. You’re just not hunting, Robin. Okay? No.”

“But you said that you wanted me to work with you,” she says, a little hotly. “This is me working with you. It’s a compromise. Right? When I’m eighteen, that’ll be like three years from now. I won’t even bring it up until then. Please?”

“Sam’s teaching you how to negotiate, huh?” Dean lifts an eyebrow. Next time he sees Sammy, he’s going to have to kick his ass. He sighs. “I’m gonna go inside and talk to your mom.”

Robin’s eyes go from soft back to hard and her mouth pulls into another scowl. “Why? She’s just gonna say that I can’t.”

“Probably, yeah,” he admits with an unabashed smile. “And when I get back, you and me are going to have a little chat about your attitude. Be a hell of a good time, I’m thinking.”

“Whatever.”

“See?” Dean points a finger at her. “That right there. Attitude.”

 

Dean goes through the backdoor and straight up the stairs to Jo’s room. Run-ins with Ellen still make him kind of nervous, even if he’d never admit it. It’s an awkward situation at best. (“Hey, remember that time I got drunk and knocked up your daughter? Fun times, right?”) 

He opens the door just as Jo is pulling on a t-shirt and he waits quietly in the doorway as she buttons up her jeans.

“Dean. Boundaries,” she says loudly. He thinks that she might be mad at him, but when she turns around she’s smiling. “Hey.”

He smiles back. “Hi.”

“So, forget how to knock?”

He tries an old standby. “You’re fucking gorgeous, you know that?” 

“Oh, nice bullshit,” she says. She slips a ring on her left hand and ties her hair up in a messy bun. Her lips are dry against his cheek when she leans up to kiss him and she leaves one hand on his chest with her fingers spread against the material of his shirt. Her thumb slips past one of the buttons. “You talk to her?” 

His mouth twists in a light smirk and he shrugs, flicking a loose chunk of hair over her shoulder. “In a matter of speaking.” 

“You fight with her?” Jo asks through a laugh. She drops her hand from his chest and messes her fingers through her hair again, making sure there are no more pieces for him to play with.

“Yeah, pretty much. She’s a freakin’ handful and a half, huh? Christ.” He shakes his head and leans against the doorframe, hands in his pockets. “How long is she gonna be this way?”

“She’s a teenager. She’ll grow out of it.”

“Oh, yeah? Like you?” Dean asks. He smiles at her again and she sweetly lifts a middle finger in his direction, but that only makes him smile wider. “C’mon. She’s just like you, Jo. If she was any more like you she’d be climbing out of windows and driving off to Pittsburgh.”

Jo frowns. “That’s not funny.” 

“It’s a little bit funny,” he says, shrugging. “It was just a joke, Jo. Take it easy.” He touches her chin with his knuckle and gives it a little tap, a leftover habit from years ago. “Besides, the kid doesn’t even know how to drive yet. She’d have to hitch.”

Her frown deepens. “Even less funny.”

“She’s starting to get one hell of a mouth on her, too.”

Jo points an accusatory finger at him. “That one’s your fault.”

His shoulders move up in an almost conceding shrug, but both of them know that growing up around hunters (and not to mention Ellen) that Jo can swear like the illegitimate child of a trucker and a sailor on shore leave.

“You and me, huh? Sam says it’s the universe’s way of saying fuck you. Something to do with karma or whatever.”

“Oh, really?” Jo says. She gives a lopsided smirk and quickly clicks her tongue behind her teeth. “Well, your brother was here last week with about three books on werewolf lore.”

Dean makes a face. “Sammy was?” 

“Uh-huh.”

He shakes his head. “What a dick.” 

“You’re telling me. I could’ve killed him.” She slides her hands into the back pockets of her jeans and nods her head. “Got time for a beer?”

“With you? Always, sweetheart.” 

She lifts her eyebrows, her mouth coming up in another smirk and quickly says, “Thought I warned you about your bullshitting?” before slipping into the hallway. 

He follows, laughing again. And he likes that he still knows how to push her buttons. If ever there was a constant between the two of them, it’d be fighting and fucking. And if he’s being honest? Dean wouldn’t change that for anything. (Well, maybe more fucking than fighting, but sometimes one follows the other, so he can’t really complain.) 

He throws an arm around her shoulders as they lope down the stairs and into the bar and she lightly nudges him with her hip and smiles. 

“Thanks for coming down, Dean.”

He grins a bit and then presses a quick kiss to the top of her head. “Anytime, Jo.”


End file.
